Mary Stuart (34 page)

Yet this was but semblance. In reality her pride was undiminished, and she had but one thought—that of recovering freedom and sovereignty. Not for a moment did she seriously desire to become reconciled with her lot. Work at the broidery frame, reading, conversation and reverie served only to conceal her real work, which was conspiracy. From the first to the last day of her imprisonment Mary was perpetually plotting, and wherever she went her habitation was a centre of intrigue. Work went on in her apartments feverishly by day and by night. Behind closed doors Mary, with the aid of her two secretaries, composed holograph diplomatic letters to the French and Spanish ambassadors, to the papal legate, to her adherents in Scotland and in the Netherlands. At the same time she sent imploring or tranquillising, humble or proud letters to Elizabeth, who had long ceased to answer them. In a hundred different disguises her messengers made their way to and from Paris and Madrid. Secret signs were agreed upon; ciphers were elaborated, and changed month by month; an overseas correspondence with the enemies of Elizabeth went on day after day. All the members of the little court—as Cecil knew perfectly well, and therefore was continually trying to have its numbers reduced—worked as a general staff aiming to promote her escape. Her fifty servants paid visit after visit to the neighbouring villages, to gather news, for the local population was bribed under cover of alms-giving, and was part of the gossamer organisation which kept Mary in touch with Madrid and Rome. Letters were smuggled in and out with the washing, in books, in hollow sticks, beneath the lids of ornamental boxes or in other ingenious hiding places. New tricks were continually being devised to elude Shrewsbury's vigilance. For instance, the lining of a shoe would be opened up to hide between the layers a message written in invisible ink; or wigs were worn in which rolls of paper could be concealed. In the books which Mary Stuart received from Paris or from London, letters were underlined in accordance with a code, and important messages could thus be transmitted. The most compromising documents would be stitched beneath the inner sole of his shoe by the confessor. Mary Stuart, who in youth had learnt how to elaborate and to decipher cryptograms, directed the whole diplomatic service; and this exciting amusement of frustrating Elizabeth's precautions kept her intelligence alert, replacing outdoor sports and other amusements. She flung herself with her usual heedlessness and ardour into this conspiratorial activity, with the result that often enough, when messages and pledges had come by some new route from Paris, from Rome or from Madrid, she could succeed in convincing herself that she was once more in possession of real power, could regard herself as a centre of European interest. The thought that Elizabeth knew her to be dangerous and yet could not bend her will, that despite the vigilance of those who kept watch over her she could conduct a campaign from her prison and modify the destinies of the world was, perhaps, the only pleasure which diverted and refreshed her mind during those long and vacant years.

Marvellous indeed was her energy, the vigour she continued to show though in chains; but it was tragical, likewise, through its futility. For Mary never had any luck in her undertakings. The conspiracies she was continually instigating were foredoomed to failure. The game was too unequal. The individual is always weak in face of an effective organisation. Mary Stuart was alone, whereas Elizabeth was the head of a great state, was in command of ministers, police, soldiers and spies; and besides, one can fight better from a government office than from a prison. Cecil had ample resources at his disposal; he could spend freely and, watching with a thousand eyes, could easily checkmate the attempts of this lonely and inexperienced woman. At that time the population of England was about three million. A large number, no doubt; but the authorities kept close watch on suspects; every foreigner who landed on the English coast was under strict observation; there were spies in the taverns, in the prisons, upon the ships that crossed the Channel. When these means failed to elicit the desired information, there was no hesitation in employing a stronger instrument—the rack.

The superiority of collective force over individual force was soon manifest. One after another of Mary's self-sacrificing friends was, in the course of her years of imprisonment, dragged into the vaults of the Tower and tortured into avowing the schemes and the names of his confederates. One plot after another was crushed by this brutal method. Even when, now and again, Mary Stuart was able, by way of the embassies, to smuggle her correspondence abroad, it took weeks before her letters could reach Rome or Madrid; and many weeks more before her correspondents in the foreign capitals made up their minds to answer these dangerous dispatches; and many weeks more before the answer could get back to her. How supine then was the help which was offered; how intolerably lukewarm did it seem to the impatient woman who was always waiting for armies and armadas to be sent to set her free. The prisoner, the solitary, thinking day and night of his own sad fate, is always inclined to believe that those who live in the free and active world must be thinking as much about him as he thinks about himself. Of course, it is not so.

Vainly, therefore, did Mary Stuart continue to represent her liberation as the most important step towards the Counter-Reformation, as the first and most noteworthy thing the Catholic Church could do to safeguard its position. Those to whom she addressed these instigations were calculators and procrastinators, and were not agreed among themselves. The armada was not equipped; its main promoter, Philip II of Spain, prayed much, but ventured little. He was not inclined, on behalf of the imprisoned Scottish Queen, to declare a war whose outcome no one could foresee. Now and again he or the Pope would send money, to help her to bribe conspirators. But the plots were poor things, badly planned and promptly ferreted out by Walsingham's spies! Only a few mutilated corpses on Tower Hill served, from time to time, to remind the populace that at some castle in the north there lived a royal prisoner who obstinately persisted in her claim to be the rightful Queen of England; to show the multitude that there were still fools and heroes ready to throw away their lives on behalf of this woman's alleged rights.

It was plain to all intelligent persons that Mary's incessant plotting would in the end drag her down to destruction; that she was leading a forlorn hope when, from her prison, she declared war against one of the mightiest monarchs of that day. As early as 1572, after the failure of the Ridolfi conspiracy, her brotherin-law Charles IX angrily declared: “The poor foolish woman will not desist until she loses her head. She will certainly bring about her own execution. If she does so, it will be her own fault, for I can do nothing to hinder her.” These were harsh words from a man whose own heroism sufficed only to make him, during the Massacre of St Bartholomew, fire upon unarmed fugitives from a safe window in the Louvre.

From the outlook of chill reason, Mary behaved foolishly in preferring the hopeless part of conspiracy to making a convenient but cowardly capitulation. It is probable that a timely renunciation of her royal pretensions would have unlocked the doors of her prison house, and if so, during all these years she had the key in her own hands. She need merely humble herself, solemnly abandon her claim alike to the Scottish and to the English throne, and England would have set her at liberty. England would have been glad to do so. Several times Elizabeth—not from magnanimity but from fear, because the accusing presence of this dangerous prisoner was a nightmare to her—endeavoured to build a golden bridge for Mary; again and again she was ready to negotiate with her “dear sister”, and offer an easy compromise. But Mary would rather remain a crowned prisoner than be a queen without a throne; and Knollys had rightly judged her when, during the first days of her imprisonment, he said of her that she had courage to hold out so long as there was left no more than a span of hope. She was keen-witted enough to understand that, if set free as a queen who had abdicated, she could enjoy nothing more than a pitiful freedom; that all that could then await her would be a shameful existence in some out-of-the-way corner; and that it was her present abasement which would give her a great position in history. Stronger than the bars of her prison house were the barriers imposed by her formal declaration that she would never abdicate, and that the last words she uttered on earth would be those of a Queen of Scotland.

Very narrow are the limits between folly and foolhardiness, for the most heroic actions can always be regarded as foolish. In concrete affairs Sancho Panza is shrewder than Don Quixote, and from the standpoint of a “reasonable” man Thersites is more reasonable than Achilles; but Hamlet's words, “Rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument, but greatly to find quarrel in a straw when honour's at the stake,” will remain the acid test of a heroic nature. Beyond question Mary Stuart's resistance was almost hopeless against such overwhelming superiority of force; yet we should do wrong to call it absurd because it was in the end unsuccessful. Throughout these years, and more effectively as year followed year, this seemingly powerless and lonely woman, by her defiance, incorporated an immense power; and, for the very reason that she shook her chains, again and again she made England quake and Elizabeth's heart tremble. We regard historical happenings in a false perspective when we look upon them only from the convenient standpoint of posterity, which sees effects as well as causes. When the hurly-burly's done, when the battle's lost or won, it is easy to stigmatise him who has been vanquished as a fool because he ventured a dangerous combat.

For nigh on twenty years the decision of the struggle between these two women hung in the balance. Many of the conspiracies instigated to restore Mary Stuart to the throne of Scotland or to establish her on that of England might, with better luck and more adroitness, have proved fatal to Elizabeth. Twice or thrice, the Tudor Queen escaped only by a hair's breadth. First of all the Duke of Northumberland rebelled at the head of the Catholic nobles. The whole of the north was in an uproar, and Elizabeth found it hard work to remain mistress of the situation. Then, yet more dangerous, came the Duke of Norfolk's intrigue. The flower of the English nobility, and among them some of Elizabeth's closest friends, such as the Earl of Leicester, supported his scheme for marrying the Scottish Queen, who, lest he should be a laggard in love (what would she not do to promote her triumph?), wrote him the most affectionate letters. Through the intermediation of Ridolfi, the Florentine, Spanish and French troops were ready to land on English soil. Had not Norfolk (as shown by his before-mentioned repudiation of his marital scheme) been a weakling and a coward, had not chance, wind and storm, the sea and betrayal, wrought against the enterprise, the page would have been turned, roles exchanged. Mary Stuart would have gone to live at Westminster while Elizabeth Tudor would have languished in the Tower or have been in her coffin.

The execution of Norfolk, the fate of Northumberland and of all the others who, during these years, had laid down their lives for Mary's sake, did not deter her last suitor. Another wooer appeared upon the scene, Don John of Austria, illegitimate son of Charles V and half-brother of Philip II, the victor of Lepanto, exemplar of chivalry, the first warrior of Christendom. Excluded from the Spanish succession by his bastardy, he had attempted to found a kingdom for himself in Tunis. Then there offered a chance of mounting the Scottish throne by a marriage to the imprisoned Queen. His army was being equipped in the Netherlands, and a plan had been made for the deliverance of Mary when Don John was struck down by the fate that awaited all her helpers. He died prematurely …

It was luck that failed, rather than cunning. If we look clearly into the matter of this prolonged struggle between Elizabeth and Mary, luck always favoured the former, whereas disaster invariably dogged the latter's courses. Force against force, personality against personality, the women were fairly matched. Not so their respective stars. Once luck had definitely turned against Mary, once she had been dethroned and imprisoned, all her attempts miscarried. The fleets sent against England were scattered by storms; her messengers lost their way; her suitors died or were slain; her friends lacked vigour in the decisive hour; and whoever tried to help her was working for his own destruction.

Profoundly moving, therefore, was what Norfolk said upon the scaffold: “Nothing that was begun by her or for her has ever turned out well.” Evil had pursued her from the time when Bothwell had become her lover. It was equally fatal to love her or to be loved by her. Whoever wished her well did her harm; whoever served her invited death to tap him on the shoulder. As the loadstone mountain in the Arabian tale attracted ships to their wreck because of the iron they had on board, so did she tend to involve all who came near her in her own unhappy fate. That is why her name has become invested with the sinister magic of death. The more hopeless her cause, the more fiercely did she fight. Her long and melancholy imprisonment, instead of breaking her pride, stiffened her to renewed defiance. Of her own free will, though aware that what she did was futile, she challenged the final award of destiny.

T
HE YEARS SPED BY
. Days, weeks, months, passed like tenuous clouds over the skies of Mary's solitude, and were barely noticed in the monotonous course of her life. Nevertheless, time was laying its mark upon her and her contemporaries, and was transforming the world about her. She had reached her fifth decade, an ominous period in a woman's vital span; and still Mary Stuart remained a captive, still was she deprived of her freedom. Gently, age began to touch her; the hair at her temples was turning grey; her body began to thicken, her general appearance slowly assumed a more matronly aspect, and a quiet melancholy took possession of her soul, a sadness which she sublimated into religious fervour. Deep in her heart, the woman within must have come to realise that the days of love were gone for ever. What could not be fulfilled now must remain unfulfilled to all eternity. Evening had drawn in, and the dark nighttime was at hand. It was long since a wooer had sued for her; perhaps no man would again present himself as a possible lover. In a brief space, maybe, life would be irreclaimably closed. Was there any sense in waiting, and again waiting, for a miracle to happen, for the miracle of liberation, for the miracle of aid coming to her from an indifferent world? During recent years a feeling had been growing stronger with every passing day, that this long-suffering woman was weary of the struggle, and that slowly she was making up her mind to renounce all and accept a compromise. Ever more frequently did she ask herself whether it was not mad and useless to allow herself to wilt away like a flower in the shade, unloved, unremembered; whether she would not be better advised to buy her freedom, and of her own free will to renounce the crown. Mary Stuart, for all her courage, was finding that captivity pressed too heavily upon her tired spirit; life had become so empty that her craving for power was slowly changing into a mystical longing for death. This explains her mood on the morning of her execution, when she wrote the heart-rending lines:

(O Lord my God, I have hoped in Thee. O dear Lord Jesu, set me free. Though hard the chains that fasten me, and sore my lot, yet I long for Thee; I languish, and groaning bend my knee, adoring, imploring—set me free.) Since none came to deliver her, Mary turned more and more to her Redeemer. Far better to commit her soul into His hands than to continue to live so empty an existence, to continue waiting and uncertain, expectant and full of hope, only at last to be frustrated once more. Let an end be made—whether good or bad, whether through victory or complete relinquishment of her claim, she no longer cared. And since Mary Stuart herself desired this end with every energy of her nature, accomplishment could not fail to ensue.

The longer the struggle continued, the more tenacious had the two antagonists become. Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor confronted one another defiantly. In the political arena the English Queen secured one success after another. She had composed her differences with France; Spain dared not declare war; her hand lay heavy upon malcontents at home and abroad. But one enemy remained to deal satisfactorily with—a woman within her own borders, a woman conquered and yet unconquerable. Only when this last foe had been set aside could Elizabeth look upon herself as a genuine victress. For Mary Stuart, too, Elizabeth Tudor remained the only survivor upon whom to concentrate the full fury of her hatred.

In a fit of despairing moodiness she made a last appeal to the humane feelings of her sister in destiny, writing an epistle whose plaintiveness is most affecting.

Then she added a final plea:

Elizabeth turned a deaf ear to this moving appeal, and no compassionate word dropped from her lips. But Mary Stuart, too, henceforward kept silent and clenched her fists. Hatred now possessed her, a cold and fierce and enduring hatred, all the more ardent because it was concentrated upon one individual, the last of her enemies to remain alive, since the others had either died a natural death or had been put away by their foes and adversaries. It was as if a demon of death emanated from the person of Mary Stuart, a demon that assailed as indiscriminately those she loved as it assailed those she hated, slaying or maiming her supporters and her antagonists alike. The accusers at the York Commission of Inquiry, Moray, Morton and Lethington, died violent deaths; those who at York sat in judgement upon her, Northumberland and Norfolk, lost their heads on the block; those who conspired against Darnley and those who did the same by Bothwell, the traitors of Kirk o' Field, of Carberry Hill, and of Langside, betrayed themselves, as in the case of Lindsay and Kirkcaldy; those she abhorred, the whole band of wild, ruthless and dangerous men who loved life so greedily, the lords and earls of Scotland, slew one another, thus settling age-long disputes with the point of a dirk. The arena had been well-nigh emptied of combatants. One alone remained for Mary to wrestle with and to hate—Elizabeth Tudor. Thus the combat had degenerated into a duel. One would have to remain victorious; the other needs must be vanquished. The hour for trafficking and compromise had gone by; now it was a struggle for life or for death.

Mary Stuart rallied her remaining energies for this ultimate struggle. Her last hope had to be taken from her. She would have to submit to a final and profound affront. This had ever been the case with Mary—her superb courage, her unlimited resoluteness, were never greater than when all was lost or seemed to be lost. Her true heroism shone forth whenever there was nothing more to expect.

Mary's last hope now was that she might come to an understanding with her son. For during the tedious and uneventful years that had crumbled away behind her, and during which her fresh and youthful visage had been changed into a sere and pallid countenance, a child had grown to boyhood, the son of her womb, with her own blood coursing in his veins. She had left her infant behind at Stirling Castle when she rode forth to Edinburgh, where Bothwell's troopers surrounded and abducted her. Never since then had she set eyes on James. Ten years passed, fifteen years went by; now the baby she had clasped in her arms was a stripling of seventeen, James VI, King of Scotland. Soon he would be a full-grown man. Qualities of both his parents were mingled in his disposition. He possessed a queer makeup; his body was plump and stocky; his speech was heavy, his tongue unwieldy; his spirit lay under a pall of anxiety and shyness. A superficial glance conveyed the impression that the boy was abnormal. He withdrew from social intercourse, was alarmed at the sight of naked steel, trembled before dogs. His ways were uncouth, his manners far from polished. The delicate and ingrained charm of his mother was completely lacking. Nor was he musical; indeed he loved neither music nor the dance; he could not participate in gay and pleasant conversation. But he acquired foreign languages with ease, had an excellent memory and a certain shrewdness and resoluteness manifested themselves where his personal advantage was concerned. Unhappily, many of the father's unworthier traits had been transferred to the son; for James was infirm of purpose, had no true sense of honour and was never to be depended upon. Elizabeth once asked irritably what one could expect from this double-tongued fellow. James, like Darnley, was twisted hither and thither by almost anybody he came in contact with. Generous impulses remained totally alien to his nature; cold and calculating ambition governed his decisions, and his unwavering coolness towards his mother can be understood only when we consider it without any reference to accepted ideas of filial piety and sentiment.

The lad had been mainly educated and taught Latin by one of Mary's bitterest enemies, George Buchanan, the author of the defamatory pamphlet
Detection
; and all his life James had been brought up to believe that his mother had encompassed his father's death, and that from her places of captivity across the border she contested his right to reign though he was crowned King of Scotland. From the outset it had been dinned into his ears that he must look upon his mother as a stranger and as an obstacle in the way to his own achievement of power. Even if a tender and childlike longing to meet the woman who had given him birth still lingered in James's heart, he could never have attained his object, for the English and Scottish wardens of both prisoners kept too keen a watch on their movements—indeed, just as Mary Was Elizabeth's prisoner so was James the prisoner of the Scottish lords and of various regents during his minority. Nevertheless, from time to time a letter would pass over the border. Mary Stuart sent occasional presents to her boy, playthings too, and once she got him a little monkey. Most of these communications and gifts were returned to the sender, because Mary would not bend her pride to addressing the child as King. So long as she persisted in calling James VI “Prince of Scotland”, and refused him his regal title, the lords maintained that her letters were an insult to their sovereign. Not even a formal relationship between mother and son was possible if she and he respectively continued to stand upon their royal prerogatives and looked upon the possession of power as of more importance than the ties of blood; if she persisted in maintaining that she alone was Queen and sovereign lady of Scotland, while he considered that he alone was King and sovereign lord of the same realm.

Mary and James could perhaps begin to draw together if she curtailed her pretension of alone being the reigning sovereign of Scotland. Despair and weariness might exercise more power over her proud and impatient spirit than any other means of persuasion. Of course, even if she yielded on a point or two, she had no intention of wholly renouncing her privilege to bear the title of Queen. She intended to live and die with the crown upon her consecrated head. But she was now prepared, at the price of regaining freedom, at least to share the royal sovereignty with her son. For the first time her thoughts turned to compromise. Let James rule the land and call himself King; but let her retain her title of Queen, so that her renunciation might at least be gilded with a little honour. Could not some formula be found? Negotiations at first promised well. But James VI, perpetually at the mercy of his threatening nobles, carried on the parleyings in a spirit of cold calculation. Without scruple, he bargained simultaneously with everyone, playing off Mary against Elizabeth and Elizabeth against Mary, using one religion as a lever against the other. He was content to sell his favour to the highest bidder, since for him the struggle did not concern his honour. What he hoped to win out of the barter was the recognition of himself as the sole and unlimited monarch of Scotland, and at the same time to secure his own succession to the English throne. He was not satisfied with being the accredited heir of one only of these two women, but must bear that relation to both. Quite prepared to remain Protestant if by doing so he added to his advantages, he was, nevertheless, equally amenable to the idea of entering the Catholic Church if the old faith offered him a handsomer price; the seventeen-year-old monarch was not even dismayed by the notion of marrying Elizabeth, if these nuptials were likely to make him King of England the sooner. Yet Elizabeth Tudor was by this time a jaded and worn-out piece of womanhood, nine years older than Mary Stuart, and the fiercest and most embittered enemy of James's mother. For Darnley's son these contemptible quibbles were no more than matters of deliberate calculation. For Mary, on the other hand, the undying child of illusion, shut away as she was from the world and its events, the parleyings to and fro acted like a bellows upon the glowing brazier of her final hopes, so that she truly believed she might come to an understanding with her son and yet retain her title of Queen.

But Elizabeth was fully awake to the peril that such a reconciliation entailed for herself. Any outcome of the sort must be hindered. She quickly took a hand in the game. Sharp-eyed and cynical as she was, it would prove no difficult affair to decoy the unscrupulous careerist—she need but trade upon his weakness. Knowing the uncouth youngster to be madly in love with the chase, Elizabeth sent him gifts of the finest horses and hounds she could lay hands on. His counsellors were handsomely bribed; and he himself—who like all the Scottish nobles and gentry was perennially short of money—was offered a yearly pension of five thousand pounds. Finally the promise of the English succession was dangled before his eyes. Money, as always, decided the issue. While Mary, ignorant of these counter-intrigues, was making diplomatic contacts with the Pope and with Spain in an endeavour to bring Scotland into the Roman Catholic fold, James VI was signing a treaty with Elizabeth wherein were incorporated the clauses which might accrue to his benefit, but where no mention was made of Mary Stuart's liberation. No thought was given to the captive, for she had become a creature of no consequence to James her son since she had no advantages to offer. As if Mary had ceased to live, he came to a workable arrangement with Elizabeth, his mother's cruellest foe. The woman to whom he owed his existence might disappear for all he cared, or must at least not enter the circle of his life. No sooner was the bond between himself and Elizabeth signed, no sooner had he got the promised pension in hand and become the master of some fine hunting dogs and horses, than, at a moment's notice, he broke off negotiations with Mary Stuart. Why should he bother about behaving courteously to a woman who had lost all power? He announced that he was under the necessity “of declining to associate her with himself in the sovereignty of Scotland”; nor could he “treat with her otherwise than as Queen Mother.” Thus a son heartlessly abandoned his royal mother to lifelong captivity. Realm, crown, power, freedom, had been snatched out of her grasp by her rival. The childless enemy thus completed her vengeance, for she had brought about the defection of Mary Stuart's son.